confessions of the christmas kind

'exhibit a'

confession: i am a packrat! it's a bad habit, i know...trust me i KNOW.. but sometimes something good can come of it...take 'exhibit a' pictured above...that's a christmas card that came to one of the guys at my office about 7 years ago...no lie...SEVEN years ago...i liked it...what's not to like about a kitty in the snow with a snowkitty? i liked it so much that i took it home and stashed it away for several years...(confession #2: i'm a procrastinator, but y'all already knew that)...then last year i got the brilliant idea to frame the card and hang it up during the winter months.

it's simply matted with white matboard...the blue secondary mat is just colored copy paper...the frame is one i had sitting around in a closet (does that mean i'm a closet packrat?):

here's a view of the back so you can see that the image is indeed a greeting card

on to exhibit 'b'!

three years ago (i think it was that long ago), i got a christmas gift from another blogger...inside the package were several slips of paper with 'merry christmas' typed in all sorts of different languages used for packing filler...i thought they were neat so guess what...I KEPT THEM...are you shocked? then last year i decided to modpodge them onto a canvas...the canvas was one that i'd painted at a class i took at michaels and i didn't like it...so it sat and sat and sat (in a closet no less)...i painted it green, modpodged the phrases on it, added a coat of glitter paint and got a neat piece of christmas art that reminds me of a dear friend:

**see next post down for a better picture

now for exhibit 'c' i present:

yards of a very nice shade of gold satin ribbon that i salvaged from a gift basket that came to our office just last week (see, this is 'fresh'...not procrastinated...)

there was a lot of this ribbon...but it was stamped with the candy company logo all.over.it...i briefly considered throwing it away as i would never put it on a package to give to someone...but it was so lovely...i was torn...that's what happens to packratters...they get torn when faced with the prospects of throwing something perfectly useful in the trash!

so i got to thinking maybe there was a way to get the wording off the ribbon...i scratched at it with my fingernail:

and the gold lettering flaked away! but i wasn't very keen on the thoughts of scratching off miles of lettering on the ribbon so i decided to take my chances and... throw it in the washing machine!

i put all of it in one of those mesh laundry bag for delicates and ran it thru every load of laundry all weekend (about 5 loads)...hung it up to dry...ironed it..AND:

i now have several yards of gold satin ribbon for FREE!

now go get your inner packrat on!

~k